Growing Drug Use A Drag On Poland

Poppy Farms Feed `Epidemic`

WARSAW — It`s midafternoon in a downtown coffeehouse that is within shouting distance of Poland`s Communist Party headquarters, and nine young people are stoned out of their minds.

High on cheap, home-brewed heroin, several of the young people stagger and topple over. One manages to sit up, but falls back, snoring loudly. Another tries to light a cigarette but can`t make the connection. A pretty girl mumbles inanely to somebody who isn`t there.

They are junkies, heavily addicted to potent drugs that cost next to nothing. Polish authorities, both state and church, express fear--apparently justified--that the addicts` ranks are proliferating with astonishing speed.

``Drug addiction is beginning to reach cataclysmic proportions and competes with alcoholism as a problem in Polish society,`` said Eva Andrzejewska, a narcotics specialist for the National Health Service.

Andrzej Wielunski, a journalist and part-time volunteer at a drug treatment clinic, said: ``Years ago it was widely agreed that socialism was by definition a system immune to drug addiction. That idea is dead.``

The drug problem didn`t take root in Poland until the 1970s because no supply system existed, drugs weren`t part of Eastern European social culture and they were prohibitively expensive in a society where the average per capita wage was $5 a day.

But today, the problem is especially worrisome in a country where one-third of the nearly 40 million population is aged 16 to 35 and there are numerous reports of children as young as 9 or 10 who get high by sniffing glue.

On Thursday, the growing of poppies from which heroin is derived was banned outright in the populous region around the Baltic seaport of Gdansk. Officials said the addiction rate in the region is the worst in Poland.

Last year, the number of deaths officially attributed to drug use was 250, almost double the previous year.

Several anti-narcotics agencies have been established in recent years, but there is no national program to provide treatment and follow-up psychological support for addicts trying to kick the habit.

A survey in 1984 found that there were only 3,200 patients in drug rehabilitation centers, about 1 percent of the estimated number of regular drug users. Another survey concluded that 40 percent of users are aged 16 to 19.

Marek Kotanski, founder of Monar, a program that operates clinics and walk-in centers for addicts in Poland, complained that Warsaw has only two state-run detoxification centers that can handle no more than 20 patients at a time.

``What we`re taking about is an epidemic,`` Kotanski said. ``Cutting off the source is the only answer.``

That won`t be easy, despite the government`s best intentions, as reflected in new laws designed to crack down on drug abuse.

Farmers who produce the raw material for home-brewed Polish heroin are reaping a financial bonanza in an otherwise hard-pressed economy. The addicts who form their market have found a way to concoct a powerful finished drug at prices that, by standards anywhere else in the world, are ludicrously cheap.

About 700,000 farmers grow poppies to provide seeds for Poland`s favorite pastry, a strudel called makowiec. The poppy stems, easily harvested and known as poppy straw, are bagged and sold in bulk, doubling a farmer`s income.

A law enacted last year requires all poppy straw to be sold to state-run agricultural distributorships that are supposed to destroy it. In fact, huge amounts of the straw are channeled to an underground network of narcotics barons.

Using a chemical process that takes less than an hour and can be done on a kitchen stove, the straw is boiled down into a thin but powerful injectable substance called kompot--a slang reference to stewed fruit, a popular Polish dessert--that is 30 to 70 percent pure heroin.

Ten grams of it, enough to satisfy the daily demands of a hard-core addict, costs about $3.50.

A less potent morphine version, known as soup, is even cheaper. It requires no chemical additives and is drunk in large quantities. Authorities say it`s a favorite of high-schoolers.

In general, though, young people experimenting with drugs go straight to the hard stuff.

``The tragedy of Poland`s drug problem,`` Kotanski said, ``is that unlike in the West, people here mostly begin with heroin because it`s so easily available.``

There also is a small but steady demand for marijuana, which usually is grown in small amounts in window sill flowerpots, and for hallucinogenics called, as in the West, speed and acid.

Articles in the Roman Catholic Church press have called for total abolition of poppy growing in Poland.

``If we Poles are so determined to have poppy seeds for our pastry, why can`t we import them?`` one writer asked.

Given the extent of the heroin problem, the writer said, that wouldn`t be much of a sacrifice.